Conventional inventory rental models are typically based upon renting items for fixed rental periods and charging late fees for keeping rented items beyond a specified return date. As used herein, the term “item” refers to any item of commerce. These types of inventory models suffer from several significant limitations. First, conventional rental models require customers to make the decision of what items to rent at substantially the same time as the decision of when to rent the items. An example that illustrates this limitation is a video rental business. Customers go to a video rental store and select particular movies to rent at that time. The customers take the movies home and must return them by a particular due date or be charged a late fee. In this situation, the customers cannot decide what movies to rent before actually renting them. The customers may have a particular movie in mind, but there is no guarantee that the video rental store has the particular movie in stock. Moreover, due dates are inconvenient for customers, particularly for “new release” movies that are generally due back the next day.
Given the current demand for inventory rental and the limitations in the prior approaches, an approach for renting items to customers that does not suffer from limitations associated with conventional inventory rental models is highly desirable. In particular, an approach for renting inventory items to customers that allows separation of customers' decisions of what items to rent from when to rent the items is highly desirable.
There is a further need for an approach for renting items to customers on a continuous basis that avoids the use of fixed due dates or rental “windows” appurtenant to conventional rental models.
There is yet a further need for an approach for renting movies, games and music to customers that is more convenient and flexible to customers than conventional approaches.
There is also a need for an approach for estimating how a user would rate an item that the user has not yet rated.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.